By Peter Christensen

Op-Ed Commentary

Everybody we knew spoke Danish. Church services were in Danish. In grade one, I got the strap, a two-foot long three-inch-wide piece of agricultural belting laid onto the open hand for speaking Danish. Admittedly it was because of the tone with which I addressed Mrs. Johanson. Had she known what I called her she would likely have administered punishment with additional fervour.

We were surrounded by other immigrant and indigenous communities: German, Icelandic, Indians on Reserves. There were Metis or half-breeds as they were called who worked seasonally on the farms, hunted, ran small sawmills and trapped for a living. They migrated to Dickson to work on farms and lived in wall tents on the undeveloped ‘road allowances. They were neither welcome on the Reserves or in settlements.  We called them “the road allowance people.”

Life was difficult in west central Alberta in the 1950s. Roads were infrequently plowed during winter and challenging to navigate during spring. There was no electricity or phones, one could fairly say we were isolated though we did have battery operated radios that we listened devotedly to for an hour on winter evenings.  Within these settlements there were strong cultural ties that bound people to each other: language, family, ethnicity, immigration and church affairs.

Things had remained unchanged since 1900, then the ‘oil rush’ of the 1960s was upon us initiating a rapid transition from rural pioneer settlement to modern industrial society. The discovery and development of large oil reserves was financed and spirited by post Second World War American cultural capital and spurred on by renewed immigration from Europe.

I wrote about this dramatic cultural shift in my 1981 book, Rig Talk.

One could say that Rig Talk was ahead of its time. Books in Canada, a Toronto based literary magazine funded by Government and written by an incipient intelligentsia said that “the people I was writing about were stupid and that I was as stupid as they were for writing about them.”

Thirty-eight years later in 2019, Rig Talk became the subject of “disidentification” and was discussed at length as ‘world making’ in Melanie Dennis Unrau’s Petropoetics of Oil Work in Canada. Rig Talk and Disidentification in Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk and Mathew Henderson’s The Lease (canlit.ca)

The Oil Rush Has Come

Broken bush and spruce country have roads

one room schools have gone the way of the outhouse.

All the little Europe’s have disappeared.

In ten years

we have come from wood heat shacks

to pink palaces

the back country is cutlined

marked square

drilled   pipelined

and torches burn.

The plains are alive

with the campfires of millionaires.

From Rig Talk. Peter Christensen Thistledown Press 1981

There was little money generated by our small farm and jobs were scarce. Most of the young men left home and worked in the oil patch. Neil, one of my classmates, dropped out of school and found work on a rig. He returned a year later minus an arm that had been torn off spinning chain, a method for disconnecting one drill stem from another using a length of chain manually thrown around a drill stem and hauled on. He caught his arm in the chain. Neil’s accident made me skittish about work on the rigs so I found work on weekends at the Spruce View Garage changing oil in vehicles and pumping gas.

That summer of 1968 a couple of strangers drove their shiny new muscle-cars into the Spruce View garage parking lot for service. They worked for TV Station CKRD at Red Deer and were doing a story on a proposed extension of the recently built David Thompson Highway which ran west from Rocky Mountain House to Saskatchewan River Crossing on the Banff-Jasper Highway.

The proposed extension would travel west from ‘The Crossing’ over Howse Pass nad down the Blaberry River valley to join the Trans-Canada Highway west of Golden, in doing so it would bypass the slow and difficult Hwy 1 route through the Kicking Horse Canyon.

Around 1800 Howes Pass was identified for trade shipments by David Thompson, an explorer, trader and map maker in the employ of the Northwest Company.  It was used to transport fur bundles out of the Northwest through the Rockies and down to the northern reach of the Columbia River’s Big Bend where it turns south and runs 1600 kilometres downstream to Fort Vancouver, Oregon; 150 kilometers up river from the Pacific Coast. From there furs were shipped down the west coast of North American around the Horn to Europe.

The Kootenai people of the Rocky Mountain Trench used this pass to migrate seasonally through to the east side of the Rockies to hunt buffalo thus the name Kootenay Plains. A shorter eastern overland route existed that used the Beaver River-Churchill River to Hudson’s Bay route however this route was closed between about 1800 and 1820 by the Cree Nation who were feeling pressured by British intrusion into their territories.

I got talking to these strangers about their cars and they asked me if I would like a job moving a vehicle from the Blaeberry trailhead to the Kootenay Flats, a large meadow and camping area about 10 miles east of Saskatchewan River Crossing. ‘The Flats’ lay at the immediate foot of the eastern slopes of the Rockies at the western edge of the Kootenay Plains.  I had not been anywhere other than to Red Deer, a small city thirty-five miles away. The thought of such a long drive gave me butterflies, I jumped at the opportunity, said I would do it!

The Alberta Government had arranged a trail ride for a group of politicians and road builders to ride from west to east along the old pack trail, now the proposed Howse Pass Extension Route. My job was to ferry a vehicle from the Blaeberry trailhead to Golden, east to Banff, north up the Banff- Jasper Highway to just south of The Crossing where I would meet the riders and bring them to the Kootenay Flats camp.

A large raised platform had been built at one end of the camping ground where the ‘White People’ were camped. Indian Days was being held at the other end of the Flats by the Bighorn People of the Wesley Band and Stoney Tribe. The Big Horn People lived on a small Reserve about thirty miles west of the coal mining town of Nordegg. They were one of the last indigenous people of West Central Alberta to live a partly traditional lifestyle: hunting and trapping, capturing and training horses and guiding were sources of income. They were based on their Reserve and migrated seasonally along the upper North Saskatchewan River.

The Indian Days celebration at the Flats camping ground was part of a yearly tourism event called The David Thompson Cavalcade, an annual joint camp-out organized by the Chambers of Commerce to promote and celebrate building the David Thompson Highway. The Big Horn people participated in this yearly event by setting up a teepee camp and selling hand made artifacts to the campers, like the old Indian Days at Banff it was a friendly summer gathering.

The construction of a stage at one end of the camping ground was new.  At sixteen years of age I did not understand the significance of this meeting where the Big Horn people for the first time were informed that a piece of their traditional hunting territory along the North Saskatchewan River would be flooded. Construction of the Big Horn dam would begin that year. The dam would be built by Calgary Power now Trans Alta Utilities, and the Alberta Government at the confluence of the Bighorn and Saskatchewan Rivers and completed in 1972 creating Lake Abraham, the largest man-made producer of hydro-electricity in Alberta.

The Honorable Gordon Taylor, Minister of Highways for the Government of Alberta, delivered a speech to the people in attendance at the Cavalcade camp. He announced the possibility of constructing a dam at the confluence of the North Saskatchewan and Big Horn Rivers.  He went on to highlight the positive aspects of hydro development for Alberta industry and rural electrification in the Rocky Mountain House area. In closing, he posed an ironic question to the audience.

“You don’t want the dam built, do you?”

The crowd, including the Big Horn Stoney, warmly applauded in response to the Minister’s question. The Big Horn people thought they were being asked if the dam should be built. The non-Indians understood the rhetorical nature of Mr. Taylor’s question, and their applause agreed with the building of a dam. The Stoney Nakoda people interpreted the statement as a question.

What the Big Horn Stony did not know was that bulldozers would that fall be burying Sundance sites, trap-lines, graves, cabins, hunting grounds and horse grazing pastures to make way for Abraham Lake. Planning of the dam had involved no evaluation of the social and environmental effects and no public hearings were held prior to its construction.

The above quote from Mr. Taylor is taken from a 1975 dissertation by Wayne Getty titled, A Case history and analysis of Stoney Indian-government interaction with regard to the Big Horn Dam: the effects of citizen participation – a lesson in government perfidy and Indian frustration.

(It is available to download from the University of Calgary Library Archives.)

The story taken from Wayne Getty’s dissertation about the Minister’s rhetorical question was likely based on someone’s recollection. The notion that the Big Horn People did not perceive his question as ironic is not entirely accurate.  Although not savvy to the machinations of political speeches it was clear to me listening to Minister Taylor’s speech that an announcement contrary to the Stoney way of life had been made.

The trail ride, the presence of the press, the stage, the upgraded event had been organized by Earnest Manning’s Social Credit Government to publicize the announcement. No consultation was intended.  The mood of the native encampment radically changed.

There followed a contest between the speech-makers and the Stoney drummers and singers. Every time the politicians spoke though their tin bullhorns from the raised platform the cries of the Stoney drummers and singers would drown them out.  I sat on a small ledge overlooking the camp hearing the Stoney’s high-pitched spirit songs and drums reverberate from the rocky walls above me. I felt a deep confusion. A tragedy was unfolding.  I was witnessing the end of a way of life.

The Big Horn People did organize under Chief John Snow and met with Earnest Manning’s Ministers to declare their opposition to building the dam and flooding of their sacred sites and territory.  Their objection and requests were met with indifference and hostility. The province took the position that Indians were a Federal responsibility. The Stoney had no say with regards to the use of provincial land, meaning any land not Indian Reserve.

The 1968 David Thompson Cavalcade turned out to be a stark eye opener for a young person from Dickson. There were other kinds of power beside Calgary Power. A duality existed. The Alberta Government Ministers claimed to be benevolent guardians of all Albertan’s interests, including Indians who were made Canadian citizens and gained the right to vote federally in 1960 and provincially in 1965.

There were powerful forces at work that could dictate the fate of whole communities. Though Christian and Democratic, as Earnest Manning’s Social Credit Party of the day claimed to be, when it came to ‘Indians’, native voices were ignored.

The Stoney had descended from a continent of skills and knowledge that had given them protection while transitioning from nomadic hunter gatherers to fur traders, even to Reservation life and having their children rounded up and sent to Residential schools.

It was true that the Stoney were on ‘benefits’ and spent too much money on bootleg liquor purchased outside the Lower Bar in Rocky Mountain House. Even so, many Stoney still possessed material and spiritual knowledge from a century’s old way of living along the North Saskatchewan River. Stories and rituals connected to place had survived even though dependency and poverty at times prevailed but the wholesale destruction of their spiritual sites and hunting territory was final.

An accelerating and presumed social revisionism was at work.  It used denial and chicanery. It flooded sacred places. The conquerors had won and were wiping the slate clean.

No plans for transition or accommodation had been made. Indians were a federal problem.

– Peter Christensen is a Columbia Valley-based writer and poet

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